Serial attached storage protocols, such as serial ATA (SATA) and serial SCSI (SAS) are becoming more prevalent for connecting hard drives to a computer system. In computer systems implementing such serial storage devices, one storage device in the system may communicate with others. For example, a device requesting data (referred to as the initiator device) may receive data from a target device.
Typically, communication between the devices may occur after an identification sequence and the establishing of connections between the devices. Once a connection is opened by a target device to an initiator device, the initiator may use an initiator connection tag (ICT) field in an open address frame to look up the remote node context for that particular target.
On the other hand, when a connection is opened by an initiator, the target does not get a tag to get the remote node context of the initiator. Typically this issue is resolved in firmware. However, the problem with handling device communication for this scenario is that real time handling requirements are added to the host CPU, thus slowing down the performance.